NYU Opportunity to Walk from Classroom to Job
With the recent court decision, NYU appears well on its way to getting most of what it wanted as part of the NYU 2031 plan. Are there any alternatives to this and future NYU expansions?
There is a possible solution. If NYU wants to continue growing it should con- sider major decentralization out of Greenwich Village. Moves to get into Williamsburg or Governor’s Island have not slowed growth in the Village.
The first, already suggested, is to move the 5,000 or so Stern Business school stu- dents to the Wall Street area. The local community board is in favor of this. Although students can’t run back and forth from the business courses on Wall Street to the general liberal arts courses on the Washington Square campus, they don’t have to. Many liberal arts colleges are smaller than Stern and there is no reason why the entire program can’t be moved down there. Furthermore, the closeness to these Wall Street firms could make joint programs possible, such as internships or rotations through their offices, similar to what medical students do when they rotate through private offices and clinics.
Wall Street has the highest concentration of people working in the financial sector in the country. NYU could develop programs to attract these workers into business-oriented programs. This school already has over 60 pages of courses in business already. Not 60 courses, but 60 pages of courses. There are many experi- enced professionals who could be recruited as faculty. This unique location could pro- vide opportunity for NYU to expand and improve quality of business education for the students.
A second possibility is moving the School of Law to Foley Square. 2,000 law students leaving their beautiful Washington Square building seems far fetched, but the area around Foley Square has one of the highest concentrations of courts, prisons, legal firms and personnel in the country. Liberal arts courses wouldn’t be needed for these graduate programs but there would be possibilities of rotating law students through nearby offices and courts (and prisons and holding pens for that matter), to provide educational benefits. Countless local legal staffs and court officers could be offered, a range of law related courses in addition to full law degrees. Judges and lawyers might also relish the opportunity to become part-time law school faculty in a very convenient location.
The third possibility is to move the 3-4,000 students of the Tisch School of Fine Arts and the Steinhardt School to the Westside theater district, which has the highest concentration of performing arts venues is the country. As with the other proposals, this would put NYU students in the middle of this area with access to countless opportunities for entertainment related studies and work, from performing to support services, and give many individuals already in the industry significantly easier access to NYU. Faculty recruitment could similarly benefit.
The idea of decentralizing 10-11,000 of its students, about one quarter of the total university enrollment, might seem extreme. Selling the Bronx campus in 1973 was also extreme, but it was done for the benefit of the whole university. The atmo- sphere of Greenwich Village offers a lot to undergraduates, but it is not the only interesting neighborhood in New York City. All of these sites are a short subway ride to the main Washington Square campus and offer a chance for improved educational programs, and new students and faculty without the constant conflict with the Greenwich Village community.
Decentralization has already occurred to some NYU faculty. The School of Nursing is now fundraising to move from its offices on Broadway to a new building on First Avenue. Some of the school’s programs are already located in the Dental School, on First Avenue, and a new building will complete the transition. The stretch of First Avenue, from 14th to 34th streets, which also includes the NYU Langone Medical Center, is sometimes referred to as Bedpan Alley because it has the highest concentration of medical facilities in the city. Nursing students will have more opportunities for a wide variety of teaching sites, and staff and faculty at those sites will have much better access to NYU programs. Educational benefits for the students are overriding convenience and Village-centric inertia. NYU has already had expansions of programs or residences into Westchester, the East Village, Brooklyn, several European cities and even Abu Dhabi without destroying the university, and this proposal would continue this tra- dition by transferring whole programs away from crowded Greenwich Village.
All of these proposals will require work, money, and a change in NYU’s vision of its future growth. But, unless the vision also includes endless conflict with the com- munity and expansion in one of the most crowded and expensive neighborhoods in the city, then alternatives should be considered. The proposals offered here all have potential educational benefits and a wide variety of opportunities for NYU expansion. Moving out of the Bronx campus helped NYU in the past, and spreading out of Greenwich Village could help it now, and help the Village too.
NYU Sprawl Continues in New York City and Beyond…
Other campuses that NYU has already grown in NY are the NYU Langone Medical campus on the East River; the continuing education programs in the Financial District; the Polytechnic Institute of NYU in downtown Brooklyn; the School of Social Work branch campuses in Westchester County and the research facilities near Tuxedo, NY.
Additionally NYU now has international academic centers in Florence, Italy; Abu Dhabi; Accra; Lon- don; Paris; Sydney, Australia; Prague; Shanghai; Berlin; Buenos Aires; Madrid and Tel Aviv.
That NYU has already spread their Residence Halls up to the Union Square area and eastward shows that immediacy is not essential for students.
- Brian Pape
NYU Insidiously Takes Over Affordable Rentals
It is not just a case of skyscraper dorms being built. NYU is also taking over all the available rent stabilized housing in existing buildings in the East and West Villages and Chinatown. I feel like the RA in my building where 75% of the tenants are NYU students. My friend’s Ukrainian landlord dad on 7th St and my Chinese landlord friend say it’s an offer you can’t refuse. They are perfect tenants – they pay top dollar rents, they are there till May but they pay for the year, if they misbehave they are evicted without problem, there are no issues with HPD and no 311 calls. For New Yorkers however, there are no affordable rent-stabilized rentals, and no investment in the community by these transients so the grocery stores end up closing and being replaced by Subway and 7/11. 14th Street is a hellacious frat boy strip on the weekends, as is most of the East Village. Ugh. NYU is a grand destroyer of quality of life in all ways.
— Jane Barrer
